“Light, at the end of the tunnel” – from which we learn that women invented politics

For some, the electoral campaign has not started, yet. For others, more lucid, as Radu F. Alexandru, the playwright who signs “Light, at the end of the tunnel”, staged for the first time in the theatrical season 2016 – 2017 in the Painting Hall of the National Theatre Bucharest (the “nursery” where the institution is testing new texts with small assistance and costs), the electoral campaign never ended. This is because man is a political animal, as Aristotle said.

Most of the four characters of the play, performed (in the evening when the Romanian Matrix assisted at the premiere for the press) by Constantin Cotimanis, Iuliana Moise (alternatively distributed with Monica Davidescu), Alexandra Poiană and Dragoș Stemate behave like all animals, not necessarily political.

The “Light…” illustrates, with the aid of an exceptional scenography signed by Puiu Antemir, a quadrilateral love story comprising the (well versed, how else) politician Virgil “Gil” Neacșu, his wife (sentimentally unfaithful, but faithful to his political schemes) Delia, Doru Maxim, an emasculated dandy and the latter’s lover and, well, the indescribable – until one point – Luminiţa.

Constantin Cotimanis, masterly playing a dirty politician Photo: NTB

What makes “Light, at the end of the tunnel” an impossible to miss theatrical stop – apart from its local (in reality, universal) flavour to which many will instantaneously react – is the furious, exciting pace of the text. Like our day-to-day politics, “Light” (the play, not the eponymous character, Luminiţa – Romanian for “light”) is an ambitious race for acquiring unfair advantages – but also for the public’s applause and for truth -, in an ecosystem more corrupted than the sum of its components.

Doru (to Gil): – Investments? That is how you call the lovers’ affectionate gestures?

Delia: – He has the language of a tehnocrat…

When a politician, moreover a minister, risks a career failure due to the denunciation of a cheated wife, the disaster begins to take shape. For 90 minutes, between four walls (glass walls, because their universe is precarious) and listened – not by secret services, but by the gloating spectators – the stars will try to evade with the maximum amount of benefits, be it financial or amorous.

A political comedy, in which hilarious exchanges abound and which teaches us that nobody escapes death and politics, but mostly that you cannot trick women, even if you are a charlatan in the vein of a Victor Lustig.

Aided by three actors who live up to expectations, Constantin Cotimanis plays a brilliant part and the fact that I could identify at least one parliamentary in the hall is the irrefutable proof that good art enchants even the scamps. After all, man is a political animal…

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